making special ⁽³⁾

This first appeared on substack in June 2023. The etymology of the word thing is more interesting than one might think. Originally this usage meant "assembly", and this itself perhaps arose from a metonymic use when referring to the time appointed… —to decide or assemble. Later this happening then came to mean, again metonymically, a specific issue discussed at such…

“We are artifacts designed by natural selection,” Daniel Dennett wrote, to which Fodor said no. “Darwin’s idea is much deeper, much more beautiful, and appreciably scarier: We are artifacts designed by selection in exactly the sense in which the Rockies are artifacts designed by erosion; which is to say that we aren’t artifacts and nothing designed us. We are, and…

Christopher Brennan calls the gaping issue an ‘annoying wobble between’. I like that, it is less pompous than my Janus dancing the two-faced ratios. My wife Mona went to ante-natal exercises called Pregnastics here in Hobart, and her classmate, an old friend, Anitra, said that it was ‘really just a wobble and a chat’. Our to-be-born child is now 21…